Peer review is a method used by Universities, Scholarly Journals, Government Agencies, Foundations and the like to review and evaluate the worthiness or value of papers submitted, for example as a part course work, or for publication, or as a proposal for a grant. Schools, and in particular primary and secondary schools, also use peer review to provide feedback for improvement. Peer review is typically carried out by several reviewers, to mitigate the effect of any prejudice which may influence the opinion of a single reviewer. The reviewers typically analyze the papers for strengths and weaknesses, and typically provide a written end result, such as, for example, comments, a grade, a recommendation with respect to publication or funding, and/or suggestions for improvement. Current methods for peer review suffer from problems of being too time consuming, wasteful in that a complete set of documents must typically be produced for each reviewer, and costly when such documents must be delivered to, and returned by, each reviewer by post or courier. In addition, it may not be possible when conducting peer review using manual means to completely obviate any prejudice through randomness or anonymity when desired, since a human is involved in manual methods of selecting and distributing papers to reviewers, and may either overtly or inadvertently communicate information regarding the authors to the reviewers. Moreover, in a school environment where handwritten papers are turned in, handwriting is frequently recognizable and identifiable as belonging to a particular individual, making a true “blind” review impossible.
What is needed are systems and methods for efficiently automating the process of peer review, while providing flexibility which has hitherto not been available through manual methods.